


The Song of Shrillbriar

by oldsneakers



Series: Flight Rising Collection [3]
Category: Flight Rising
Genre: Gen, Non-Graphic Violence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-13
Updated: 2019-04-13
Packaged: 2020-01-12 19:26:53
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 536
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18453080
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/oldsneakers/pseuds/oldsneakers
Summary: "My blood is far brighter than that of a mere mimic, and yet I still do not limp beneath its trials."





	The Song of Shrillbriar

Few drakes may boast of a death more deserving of their deeds than Piotr Shrillbriar. One of the Woodweld's bastards, he dreamed of inheriting his mother's forests but was forbidden such simple sweetness both by blood and by element. What trees could tolerate the dual assault of his presence eventually died, and where once was green now sway eerie monuments to Piotr's grief: marvelous kinetic sculptures whose tender mimicry is belied by their sharp songs.

Indeed, wasn't there always something not quite right about you? so it seemed his choir accused.

Unwilling to bear their shambling semblance, Piotr abandoned his garden to revenge himself upon his absent mother. An alliance with her quarry, the Clan of Keys, seemed expedient. The sure-footed savagery of their acting rulers, however, inspired his resentment to a seething righteousness with which he pursued all unjudged Beasts and other "half-living" vestiges of the Shade.

Indeed, there is something remarkable about him, his devotees observed--without questioning the parallels between their lord and their enemies. What could be nobler than routing the Shade from Sornieth? And what more sweet than nobility? In time, even Piotr forgot the innocent pleasures of his past for the adoration and absolute loyalty with which his soldiers beheld him.

None dared to interrupt the spell that united them in glorious bondage, but still some whispered:

"Mock-son."

_("You hunt your death in hunting me, for I have pledged myself to one estimably greater. You will never be free of this curse while the King of Keys yet lives, and before you touched him I would kill you. As my master lives and suffers, so he suffers.")_

"Beast-born."

_("The Woodweld? It is far more fitting you inherit the title I was bidden in cruelty.")_

"Aye, his blood is bright-- I'm sure it glitters finer than Strange Dust! What do I care as long as the war succeeds!"

As flint is struck again and again before it catches, so these repeated accusations ignited the branching agonies of his heart. And so one night, the Sphinx began to sing; and so one night, Piotr heeded her miseries as he would his own. In the Blacksands Annex, he met the Queen of Beasts and bore his soul to be branded by her; to accept the truth of their shared stigma and so abandon his crooked cause.

But she spoke in teeth above his surrender, and when his blood bore her bones the cry of the Woodweld went up; for despite her loyalties, despite her history, despite everything between them, still she and Piotr shared blood--still it sizzled and reduced to naught but a foul vapor on the Blacksands.

Jin's body was rent as it became its bladed truth: a thousand flying knives braided with blistering mock-flesh, every one singing silver for the Sphinx. Jin's grief could be neither stalled, nor influenced, nor even wielded by her old master's pleading. The eyes of the Sphinx sickled strangely into twin eclipses, and the night plunged past its membrane into the unknowable nucleus of its essence, taking with it both combatants to meet their fate elsewhere.

So ended Piotr Shrillbriar, Son of the Woodweld, whose noble heart was nevertheless judged askew and its balance restored.


End file.
